Green Room

‘Liberal’ the Netherlands Joins War on Drugs

For some reason, the Dutch government has suddenly decided to wage war on marijuana. As most foreigners undoubtedly know, the Dutch ‘tolerate’ the use of this soft drug. Heck, it’s one of the primary reasons hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to Amsterdam every year; that and the famous Red Light District.

Well, the government has now decided that enough is enough. Justice minister Ivo Opstelten announced last week that he’ll introduce a so-called weed-card. Dutchmen who want to smoke weed have to show this card to the coffeeshop owner. If they don’t own one, they can’t buy themselves a joint.

Although the card is obviously an annoyance to many Dutchmen, the ones truly hurt by it are the tourists; the card will only be available to Dutch citizens.

The Dutch tourist branch is, therefore, not exactly charmed by Opstelten’s plan. And why would they? They could very well face losses of hundreds of millions of euros – and that at a time when Europe’s economies are already struggling.

Not only will this plan be enormously costly, it’s also likely to be extremely ineffective: many tourists will undoubtedly find a Dutchman willing to buy some drugs for them (against a minor fee, of course). Perhaps they’ll even be able to buy it themselves – not in a coffee shop but at a street corner.

Which brings me to my third (and final) objection to Opstelten’s unsavory plan: drug dealers will undoubtedly take over the streets. Heck, perhaps even entire neighborhoods. And how is the government going to combat that? With the tiny, useless Dutch police force? Right. Well, that’s at least going to be… entertaining.

Being tough on crime is a wonderful idea, but declaring war on soft drugs isn’t exactly a smart move; especially not when a country is facing many other – real, rather than imagined – problems.

* Although I’m pro-legalization of soft drugs, by the way, I don’t use it myself. Just to make that clear.

This post first appeared at Right Across The Atlantic: the Internet-home for conservative and libertarian Europeans and Americans. Follow me on Twitter here.

Unidentified gunmen fire 81 shots at a house in a residential neighbourhood, probably with a machine gun. A man is found dead inside a burned-out Mercedes on a quiet stretch of woodland road. Elsewhere, hand grenades are thrown into a ‘coffeeshop’ during the night. No one is hurt, but the shop, which is licensed to sell small amounts of marijuana to the public, is severely damaged.

A wave of drugs-related violence is rocking the southern part of the Netherlands. The mayor of a small Dutch city has even gone into hiding after repeated threats to his life. And Eindhoven Mayor Rob van Gijzel is urging the national government to step in and send police reinforcements:

“We have relatively few police officers. All our policing capacity goes into investigating the gangland killings themselves. There just isn’t the manpower to find out how the criminal networks operate. That’s why we can’t tackle them directly. The ongoing investigations also mean we have less time to deal with other types of crime.”

‘Coffeeshops’ ban
Many communities have been trying to tackle the problems generated by ‘coffeeshops’. Two cities have banned the cannabis outlets altogether and, last year, the mayor of Maastricht tried to move them all out of the city centre.

Michael van der Galien, the grammar, usage, & punctuation problems within your essay might be attributable to English being your second or third language, so we’ll let them slide. However, there’s no excuse for your faulty attempts at logic.

The problem seems to be that there is a limited government-allowed monopoly which creates an inviting target for criminals in the absence of an effective police force, thus replicating the prohibitionist problems. Also, I’m wondering if Islamists might be targeting these shops as well.

Michael van der Galien, the grammar, usage, & punctuation problems within your essay might be attributable to English being your second or third language, so we’ll let them slide. However, there’s no excuse for your faulty attempts at logic.

itsnotaboutme on May 29, 2011 at 7:04 PM

Whoever the hell you are, if all you can do is critique grammar, you shouldn’t even be commenting. Good grief.

And something else: if you call this an ‘essay’ it’s all the evidence I need to conclude you probably never finished high school. Essay? This is an essay? It’s a blog post. It’s something you write quickly, in a matter of minutes.